It was reassuring to see the interviews and provisional Christmas arrangements going ahead and looking as they always had done while Broadcasting House reached its final state of War Emergency. The defence rooms were shut off by iron doors, armed guards patrolled the sub-basement, and the lists of Indispensable Personnel, except for Sam’s, were complete. After repeated consultations Sam still hesitated as to who might be asked to accompany him, perhaps for weeks on end, behind the barricades. Meanwhile all departments were asked to find volunteers for the Red Cross Certificate Course.
Accommodation put the now unused concert-hall at the disposal of the Red Cross classes. The canvas-seated chairs, drawn up too close together for comfort just beneath the platform, conjured up the rapt ghosts of the BBC’s old invited audiences. The lighting, designed for the orchestras now stranded in Bristol, was not too well suited to the lecturer, a harassed doctor from the nearby Middlesex Hospital who had probably expected younger listeners. Some of them, it was true, didn’t look much more than children, but among them were departmental heads and even an Assistant Controller with folded arms, unused to sitting on a chair without a conference table in front of him. All ranks had been mingled to learn elementary first-aid. The BBC had always been liable to these sudden appealing manifestations of the democratic spirit, derived from both its moral and its veteran-theatrical sides, reminding both highest and lowest that they shared the same calling and, at the moment, the same danger.
‘In cases of emergency,’ muttered the lecturer, ‘an umbrella, walking-cane or broomstick is sure to be handy, and will furnish an excellent splint.’ Unashamedly reading out of a hand-book, he went on: ‘When a fracture has taken place the object is to bring the ends of the broken bone as nearly as possible to the position they were in previous to the accident. In order to do this, the part nearest to the body must be steadied by someone, while that furthest removed is gently stretched out, the sound limb being uncovered and observed as a guide.… For God’s sake, ladies and gentlemen, don’t dream of doing any of these things. Leave the patient exactly as he is, and if you have to move him take him straight round to Casualties. However, my object, as I understand it, is to see that by the end of six weeks you can be passed competent in bandaging, simple and compound fractures, first and second degree burns, lesions, cramp, poisoning, intoxication, snakebite … no need to take all these down, they’re simply some of the chapter headings.…’
As soon as he decently could the doctor passed on to practical work, asking them to envisage the scene after a general attack from the air, but to assume, for the sake of convenience, that all the casualties were broken bones. DPP, sitting at the extreme edge of a row to make room for his long legs, was summoned to the front to take the part of an incident. Unruffled and resigned, labelled Multiple Injuries and Compound Fractures, he was laid out prone on one of a long line of stores trolleys. While the other incidents settled themselves he passed the time by smoking a cigar, which is difficult when both arms are immobilized.
‘Perhaps you’d like me to copy out my notes for you as I go along, Mr Haggard,’ said Willie Sharpe, bent over him and prodding him with a pencil, ‘you’ll probably miss a number of important points while you’re lying here.’ He scribbled rapidly. ‘I’ve got you down as both femurs, both collarbones and right patella.’
Jeff emitted a faint cloud of smoke. The lecturer glanced at him in understandable annoyance. The cause of realism wasn’t served by a multiple fracture smoking a cigar.
‘Please will the incidents remember not to make signs or convey information of any kind to the class.’
Willie, however, had understood that DPP wanted the ash tipped off his cigar. He did so, then, not wishing to waste an opportunity, he drew up a chair, sat down near the trolley, and leant forward eagerly, half confiding, half appealing.
‘We mustn’t grudge the time we’re spending on this Red Cross course, Mr Haggard. In fact, personally speaking, I’m very glad of the training because it contributes in a small way to one of my general aims for all humanity. I mean the maintenance of health both in mind and body. Education will be a very different thing in the world of tomorrow. It will start at birth, or even earlier. It won’t be a petty matter of School Certificate, the tedious calculations of facts and figures which hold many a keen and hopeful spirit back to-day. It will begin as we’re beginning now, Mr Haggard, you and I and all these others here this evening, with a knowledge of our own bodies and how they can be kept fighting trim – fighting, I mean, needless to say, for the things of the spirit. Yes, we shall learn to read our bodies and minds like a book and know how best to control them. Oh boy, will the teachers be in for a shock. Don’t think, either, that I’m saying that physical desires must be entirely subdued. On the contrary, Mr Haggard, they have their part to play if every individual is to develop his potentialities to the full. And the point I want to make is how very little pounds, shillings, and pence have to do with all this. Yes, sir, out in the fresh air and sunlight, with your chosen mate by your side, you’ll have little need for money.’
Carried away, glowing and translated into a generous future, Willie tucked away his notebook and pencil and passed on to the next trolley. As soon as he decently could the doctor hurried away, leaving two of his hospital nurses to carry on. At half-time, incidents and students were asked to change places. Jeff was released, and Willie became a shock case.
The following week a message was posted on all notice boards for the attention of volunteers for Red Cross training. The classes had been amalgamated with other local courses, and they were asked to attend in future at Marylebone Town Hall. Accommodation, it turned out, needed the concert-hall for a dormitory. In the event of an attack, the notice explained, personnel would be unable to get home, shift workers found it difficult already, and it hadn’t escaped Accommodation’s notice that a number of the staff never seemed to leave the building at all. In this connection, it should be emphasized that the new bathrooms on the fifth floor were for the use of grades of Assistant Controller and above. But in future the Corporation would provide beds for those who had earned them, strictly allocated on a ticket basis.
Quantities of metal bunks were dragged into Broadcasting House. Piled outside the concert-hall, they made an obstruction on the grand scale. Even the news readers, whose names and voices were known to the whole nation, were held up on their way to the studios. Even John Haliburton, assigned to read in case of enemy landing, with a voice of such hoarse distinction that if the Germans took over BH and attempted to impersonate him the listeners could never be deceived for a moment – even the beloved Halibut fell over a consignment of iron frames and himself became an incident. But the work went on with the exalted remorselessness characteristic of anyone who starts moving furniture. The bunks were fitted on top of each other in unstable tiers, and the platform, including the half-sacred spot where the grand piano had once stood, was converted into cubicles. Eddie Waterlow, insanely fond of music, was seen walking away from the sight with his head in his hands, a pantomime of grief. The fitters didn’t mind, feeling that he acknowledged the importance of their work. If Broadcasting House had been built like a ship, it now had quarters for a crew of hundreds.
At length a cord was stretched across the great hall, dividing it in half, and grey hospital blankets were draped over it in place of a curtain. Barnett and his staff thought this part of the job by no means up to standard.
‘It’ll provide privacy for the ladies, which is the main point. But I don’t like to see a job left like that.’
And might not the makeshift nature of the blankets lead to moral confusion? There were a lot of very young people among the temporary staff. Barnett was asked whether he thought there’d be goings on?
‘Surely not while England’s in danger.’ he replied.
Everyone went to look at the arrangements. ‘So near and yet so far,’ Teddy said. At the end of the week the RPAs’ tickets arrived with their time sheets. They were relieved, all of them, to think they wouldn’t have to queue any more for the all-night buses.
When Vi got home that afternoon a little brother, lying flat on his back on the lawn where the cabbage beds had become torpedoes, and he was drowned and floating, told her that someone had rung her up. When she went into the hall the telephone rang again.
‘Vi, it’s Lise.’
‘Where are you? Are you coming back to work?’
‘Vi, I want you to help me. I haven’t anywhere to live.’
‘Why don’t you go home? Southampton’s a defence zone, but of course it’ll be all right for you if your parents live there.’
‘I can’t get on with them. I don’t feel as though I’m their child at all. I don’t want to hear what they say about Frédé. When my father starts up about Frédé I feel like doing him an injury.’
‘Well, Lise, we’re full up here at the moment, I’m sorry. I don’t know whether …’
‘Listen, it isn’t for long, only for a night or so. I haven’t any money, but I’m going to get a job, then I shall have money. Listen, Vi, is it true they’ve got places to sleep now in Broadcasting House?’
‘Have you been back there, then?’
‘No, I read it in the Daily Mirror.’
‘Well, we get the Mirror, but I missed that.’
‘It was headed THIS IS THE NINE O’CLOCK SNOOZE.’
‘I didn’t see it.’
‘Vi, please get me a ticket, I’ve still got my pass, they’ll recognize me at Reception and they’ll never know I’ve left. It’s only for a very short time.’
Vi considered. There was an extra ticket, it had been sent by mistake for Della, and should have been given back immediately to Mrs Milne. Of course, if Lise was found out it would be awkward, but on the whole it wasn’t likely. They would think she’d been away in one of the regions, or on a training course, which heaven knows she’d needed badly enough.
‘I can get you a ticket, Lise, but where shall I send it to?’
‘Leave it at Reception in an envelope with my name on it. I’ll pick it up. You needn’t have anything more to do with it, you needn’t see me or talk to me.’
Although she found the pathos of this last remark irritating, Vi was dissatisfied with herself. What she had been saying fell short of the truth. The house, by her family’s standards, wasn’t full up; the other bed in her room was free. But looking back over the last six weeks or so she thought of Lise in a state of doleful shapelessness, only half listening while her job was explained to her, then collapsing into tears it seemed, when RPD was doing no more than beginning to talk to her – and after all nobody in BH worked harder than he did – then the unpleasantness about Frédé and Lise’s dampening presence in the house, Dismal Lizzie the little ones had called her and had to be threatened into silence, and finally even her mother having one or two things to say when she disappeared without explanation. Vi had been able to tell from one look at her mother’s back, as she started the washing-up, that she was hurt. Surely that was justification enough for not having Lise back.
And then, she was expecting Chris on leave, pretty well certainly this time. ‘I hope he keeps strong for you,’ said Teddy gloomily, a spectator of experience, always on the wrong side of the windowpane. Sometimes he went down to the BH typing pool to see if any of the girls would like to come out, say to the pictures, or for a cup of tea at Lyons. Their heads, dark and fair, rose expectantly as he came in, then, although he was quite nice-looking, sank down again over their work. Nor was Teddy very popular with the Old Servant who supervised the pool.
The Department was getting a new girl as a replacement, but what use was that? He’d read an article by a psychologist in some magazine or other which explained rather well how owing to Nature’s Law of Compensation girls in wartime, if they weren’t fixed up already, were practically bound to fall in love with older men. That was a scientific analysis, and you couldn’t fly in the face of science.
All the same, he allowed himself a mild interest in the newcomer. During his tea-break he went and hung about the second floor. The corridor, like all the others, curved mysteriously away, following the lines of the outer walls, and leading to sudden shipboard meetings, and even collisions, as the doors opened. Most of Administration was there, and you could usually find out what was going on. While the tape machines in the basement ticked in the world’s news from outside and radio gathered it from the air, the second floor generated the warm internal rumours of BH. There, through one of the filing clerks, a very plain girl, unfortunately, Teddy learned that they were considering an RPA application from Birmingham.